Tissue Engineering for the Temporomandibular Joint: An Updated Review

Tissue engineering potentially opens new hope for the treatment o disorders of the temporomandibular joint which frequently afflict patients. Damage or disease in this area interferes with  masticatory function and speaking, reducing patients’ quality of life. Effective treatment options for patients suffering from severe temporomandibular joint disorders are in high demand because surgical options are restricted to removal of damaged tissue or complete replacement of the joint with prosthetics.Tissue engineering techniques for the temporomandibualr joint opens new horizons for the clinical management of temporomandibular disorders.

Materials and methods: Website search(Pubmed,PMC) using the key words, Temporomandibular joint disorder; Condylar fibrocartilage; Temporomandibular joint disc; Scaffold-based tissue engineering; Scaffold-free tissue engineering; TMD

Conclusion: Tissue engineering of the TMJ is still an area of research due to the prevalence of TMD. Tissue engineering is a rapidly evolving field with the ongoing development in scaffold fabrication, cellularization strategies, and growth factor delivery; and many of these techniques have been  applied to the TMJ. However, there are still challenging problems that remained unsolved.

Author(s): Ahmed Hassan Kamil Mustafa

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